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During the Christmas holidays I spent some time “refurbishing” a netbook me and my girlfriend have, but is not used, into an home-made media center, running (at the moment) plain Ubuntu 12.10.

We watch some TV, during and after dinner, mostly for TV series and movies, and we used to do that loading everything on a USB key attached to the TV. A boring, and repetitive task. So why not giving some new life to that small netbook?

Ingredients

Installing the operating system, the necessaries codecs and all the updates is an easy-peasy experience nowadays. Nothing special to report, everything works flawlessly. After connecting all the cables, safely hidden from the eye (the back of the TV is turning into a jungle), the netbook-turned-media-center is now stored in a shady place in the living room, connected to the TV via its VGA cable (unfortunately the only video output), linked to the Hi-Fi via Bluetooth (hurray! one cable less!), with close to 2TB of USB-connected disk space, sharing videos and music on the internal network.

At the moment I’m piloting the media center via a VNC connection from a Nexus 7, but I’m planning to find a (or write my own) keyboard and mouse app for the tablet to pair up via Bluetooth with the netbook. Or a special Ubuntu oriented Android app to control an Ubuntu machine in an easy way.

I tried installing Rygel to serve media files, but had no luck in making it work. I will have to dig deeper and give it another try. The other solution I was pondering was to install XMBC. Time permitting, I’ll probably try it out.

Of course everything is not perfect: I have some high quality videos, Matroska files weighing from 2 to 8 GB, that the system is not handling in a good way. The smallest ones are not reproduced correctly, audio and video are out of sync, the biggest ones are not reproduced at all: or you get video, or you get audio. Guess the decoding is not that fast to handle everything is a smooth way. Listening to music via the Bluetooth connection to the Hi-Fi, is not as bad as I would have thought: it actually provides a really enjoyable experience.

Multiple Boards and Bootloaders

Finally, Linaro Image Tools has support for multiple boards and multiple bootloaders on single configuration file and hardware pack.

Linaro Image Tools

Linaro Image Tools is a set of command line utilities that help in the creation and installation of Linaro built operating system images so they can be run on ARM based computers.

With Linaro Image Tools you can take a generic ARM Ubuntu or Android operating system image and customise it with the hardware specific packages needed to make it run on a specific board. These hardware specific packages are found in a hardware pack, which itself is generated using a tool, linaro-hwpack-create and a configuration file.

The old days

The Old Days of Computer

In the “old days”, this configuration file (an INI-style configuration file) and hardware pack held information for just one ARM board: it was not possible to define a single configuration file for multiple boards that shared most, if not all, of the same configuration and as a consequence, the resulting hardware pack could only be used with a single device too.

Starting with the new 2012.07 Linaro Image Tools release, it is now possible to support multiple boards/devices and multiple bootloaders with a single hardware pack. This should speed up development because one hardware pack can be used for several boards running similar hardware, reducing the number of hardware packs that need to be created to test new code on multiple devices.

A new configuration file format has been created: now based on YAML, it enables engineers to express more complex scenarios, and Linaro Image Tools has been expanded to support this new format.

Backward compatibility is maintained: the old version 2 format is still supported, but it will be deprecated in the Linaro Image Tools 2012.08 release, when the new version 3 format will have had enough use to have any bugs found and fixed.

The very old version 1 format is now completely unsupported and the ability to read these files will be dropped from Linaro Image Tools with the 2012.08 release.

With these changes, a new command line tool has been written to help engineers convert an old version 2 configuration file format into a version 3 one: running linaro-hwpack-convert <config-file> will create a version 3 configuration file called <config-file>.yaml (after that you can remove the suffix, it is not necessary, but we keep the old file for you). This file is then used by linaro-hwpack-create to create a new style hardware pack. The procedure for creating a hardware pack has not changed and Linaro Image Tools will automatically detect and use the new format.

The only thing that changes when you use linaro-media-create is you can now specify a bootloader for a hardware pack that can provide more than one. Predictably, this option is –bootloader <bootloader name> and if you want to know what your options are, you can query a hardware pack by using the –read-hwpack option:

For the English speaking audience (but not only). If you are interested in a new book on the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, No Starch Press is promoting “Ubuntu Made Easy” for one week, 40% off on the paper version, and you get DRM-free ebooks format (PDF, mobi, epub) with it.

If you are trying to install or use Kindle for PC under Linux, I had a problem with the version of Wine shipped by default in Ubuntu 12.04 (that is Wine version 1.4).

After installing Wine PPA and upgrading to version 1.5, I had another problem, but this one is easily solvable: it is necessary ro rename or remove one file from the Wine installation directory. The file is:

and Kindle 4 PC will work in all its glory. Just saying it here since I found different results on the Internet, with different solutions, none of which were really working. Somebody is also reporting the necessity to have ttf-mscorefonts installed to have it work, I didn’t install them, or they have been installed by default.

Why using Kindle for PC? I’m trying to export books bought via the Kindle Store, but without the DRM. Looks like Calibre is able to do it, but I had no luck. There are plugins that should help you with that, but I still have errors while trying to import a DRMed book.

What should be necessary is a Kindle PID, not the serial number, that can be found out easily, plus your Kindle serial number. With both of them, nothing will change. I do not know if with the latest Kindle generation Amazon changed something in their encryption mechanism…